Sovereigns and Subjects: A Geopolitical History of Metropolitan Reform in the USA

Abstract

Why does metropolitan reform have such a poor track record in the United States as compared with other industrialized countries? The most common answer is the exceptional localism of US culture, which has embedded itself over the years in institutions that foster political fragmentation and sprawl. This paper, inspired by recent developments in Europe, offers an alternative explanation in the divided sovereignty of the US federal system. Sovereignty, a highly debated concept at the global level, remains a very real political hurdle at the local level because it constitutes the primary field of struggle for any claims for local self-government. The significance of divided sovereignty is the potential recourse that a second sovereign can offer to metropolitan reformers. A reframing of the issue from a constitutional perspective reveals a sharp contrast in the political conditions for metropolitan reform between Europe and the USA today: as sovereignty has moved up in Europe, secured by treaties that have shifted whole realms of authority and right to the European Union, it has been moving down in the USA, pushed by a generation of Republican presidents and an activist Supreme Court. It also highlights a political fault line that has been largely missing from theoretical and policy debates over metropolitan reform in the USA: the conflict between the big cities and their direct sovereign, the subnational states. In this paper I reconsider the troubled history of metropolitan reform in the United States from this constitutional perspective, situating efforts to achieve metropolitan self-governance in the context of the shifting division of sovereignty in the US federal system over the past seventy years.